[adambarrett5]

I just installed OS X on my Hackintosh. I bought an external optical drive so I could easily install certain programs and watch DVDs. I purchased a Samsung S084 for $40 off Amazon. It was affordable and it said it was compatible with both windows and mac. The optical drive worked for everything but the DVD Player application. Every time I tried to play a DVD it would read "There was an initialization error: A valid DVD Drive could not be found [-70012]". I considered booting up in Windows every time I wanted to watch a DVD, but I came across this, and it did the trick. It requires a little bit of modification, but the guide is very straightforward. Here is the link:

Make "DVD Player" Work Without An Internal DVD Drive | My MacBook Wind

I hope it works for you as well as it worked for me

[krs9999]

There is no need to go through all that hassle described in that link.

Just download VLC which is an application you should have anyway - it plays essentially any video format you can throw at it including DVDs.
Ignore the error message about no internal DVD player being present, open the DVD and launch the Video_TS folder with VLC.

[Leewave]

Thanks Adam, that's a brilliant find. Not too hard to do! you only need to change 8 characters then - the letters Ex for In (Internal -> External, four times) and it's a one-time fix. Until the next DVD player update, that is

VLC player is a very useful addition to your Apps folder though, it can play nearly everything.


Moving away from DVDs and concerning video files playback generally:
Two more useful video add-ons which I find essential are:

Perian
Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. Everyone should have this.

Flip4Mac
With Windows Media Components for QuickTime by Flip4Mac, you can play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) directly in QuickTime Player and view Windows Media content on the Internet using a web browser.

*** Be aware that the current version of Flip4Mac installs Silverlight by default as well. You can opt out of Silverlight if you choose, but you have to look for the option in the installer setup. The WMV components by themselves are benign.

[krs9999]

I have both Perian and Flip4Mac installed on my Mac but never use them since so far VLC has been all I needed to play back any video file.
Maybe a mistake on my partto not look at Quicktime once in a while - I just noticed that Quicktime can do a screen recording which can come in handy if there is no other way to capture streaming video.
It used to be that one needed specific software for screen recording.